Two Singapore startups aim to improve the accessibility and security of international payments

Wells Fargo announced today that it has selected two early stage payments companies — Alpha Payments Cloud and Jewel Paymentech — for investments of up to $500,000 for the spring 2016 class of the Wells Fargo Startup Accelerator, a non-exclusive, six-month, semiannual program where Wells Fargo mentors and helps startups refine their potential breakthrough technologies for financial services and other applications. Wells Fargo business and technology leaders will work closely with the incoming accelerator participants to test their concepts for merchants and guide them through the process of bringing their ideas to market. Wells Fargo is now accepting applications worldwide through June 26 for its fall 2016 class at https://accelerator.wellsfargo.com.

“Regularly collaborating with startups on a wide range of technologies through the Startup Accelerator helps Wells Fargo explore big ideas outside our walls and industry for our customers’ benefit,” says Steve Ellis, head of Wells Fargo’s Innovation Group, which serves as the catalyst for transformational change across Wells Fargo. “We’re excited to invest in Alpha Payments Cloud and Jewel Paymentech through our Startup Accelerator. Their solutions are particularly interesting for merchants in terms of facilitating international payments and minimizing transaction fraud risk.”

Alpha Payments Cloud consolidates the broad payments spectrum onto one payments-as-a-service platform called the AlphaHub that enables banks, merchants, payment service providers (PSPs), and independent sales organizations (ISOs) to access any payment type and any solution provider from anywhere in the world through application program interfaces (APIs). The depth and range of connected service providers and solutions span across the entire transactional, risk management, and commerce solution spectrum.

“Despite the wave of payments innovation, there is a massive disconnect across legacy acquirers on how to capitalize on it,” said Oliver Rajic, CEO at Alpha Payments Cloud. “The AlphaHub introduces vendor ubiquity and interoperability, whilst also offering banks a pathway to this now critical agility and value creation by embracing — not disrupting — their current technological framework. Working with Wells Fargo allows us to learn from one of the world’s most significant and experienced banks and managed service providers (MSPs) and draw upon its deep knowledge pool to continue to evolve our solution and stay ahead of the game.”

Jewel Paymentech, a financial risk technology company, develops intelligent risk solutions for the banking and electronic payments industry. Jewel’s solutions help banks and payment facilitators conduct research and analysis on merchants and manage transaction fraud risks by using predictive analytics. Jewel also offers automated real-time solutions to large merchants, such as online marketplaces, to identify illegal and counterfeit goods.

Wells Fargo’s Startup Accelerator team looks to work with innovators in areas including: analytics, mobile, cybersecurity, payments, lending, user-interaction design, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, digital marketing, and operations. Wells Fargo pairs each startup with a mentor who provides education and guidance around the process of approaching and selling products and services to a Fortune 500 company, as the demands, scale, and requirements are unique for a company this size.

An example of a Wells Fargo Startup Accelerator success story is EyeVerify, one of the three companies chosen in August 2014 to participate in the inaugural class of the program. Wells Fargo is launching a biometric authentication technology provided by EyeVerify for its corporate customers. EyeVerify’s Eyeprint ID captures an image of the veins and micro features in and around the eye of users’ eyes to verify their identity using the front-facing camera on their mobile device.

Since its inception in 2014, the Wells Fargo Startup Accelerator has received applications from more than 800 innovative companies in over 40 countries. Also, the Wells Fargo Startup Accelerator was named in March 2016 a top U.S. fintech accelerator by eFinancialCareers.